Minka: Improving the Way Latin America Interacts with Its Money

About MINKA

Minka is an open banking platform built in the cloud with blockchain technology that allows fintechs and traditional financial institutions to create new financial products in days, not years. Established in 2016, its core business is carried out in Colombia and Bolivia.

Minka is an open banking platform built in the cloud with blockchain technology that allows fintechs and traditional financial institutions to create new financial products in days, not years.

Google Cloud Results

Google Cloud Platform enables deployment in 10 minutes.

Currently, Minka can launch a feature with testing and go-live deployment in just one day.

Its architecture is perfect for GCP in terms of scalability; the number of transactions is sporadic and specific.

The platform has proved to have a high performance of over 10,000 tx/sec

Minka is an open banking platform built in the cloud with blockchain technology that allows fintechs and traditional financial institutions to create new financial products in days, not years. It started operating in 2016 and is considered a disruptive player in the conservative environment that surrounds the financial sector.

"Using Google App Engine, we managed to deploy an open banking platform using REST API. With Google Datastore, we've got a scalable NoSQL database platform that holds two important features for transactional systems: ACID and schemes. Google App Engine and Cloud Functions as microservice containers allow for comfortable deployment and support for the DevOps process."

—Domagoj Rozic, Managing Partner at Minka.

Minka currently employs 15 people and works with 7 external consultants. It is based in Bogota, Colombia, with offices in the United States and Croatia. Its core business is carried out in Colombia and Bolivia, with some projects in Central America and Croatia.

Facing Regional Challenges

Minka's motto – Improving the Way Latin America Interacts with Its Money – gives a clear picture of the huge challenge faced by the company, as it involves changing the mindset and financial habits of an entire region, plus modernizing transactional models.

The financial sector is one of the most conservative fields. It has traditionally made use of physical servers and it requires technology with flexible availability and high scalability that allows it to quickly carry out processes through a system that ensures information protection at all times. Minka, hand in hand with Google, has reached out to several financial institutions to explain how they can mitigate risks and leverage cloud features, always ensuring data protection.

Minka points out that there is no open financial service infrastructure nowadays, so startups that wish to offer different features – such as an electronic wallet or money movement – need to invest large amounts of time and resources to create such infrastructure, which most of the times is unfeasible for a startup. Minka's purpose is to offer such infrastructure so customers can launch their product in just a few weeks. To achieve this goal, Minka needed to use libraries that required a lot of processing and had to create highly complex virtual machines, so finding the right tools was critical.

Providing New Solutions with New Technologies

In early 2018, Minka started migrating its services to Google Cloud Platform. This deployment enabled the disruption it sought to make in the financial sector. By moving to the cloud, service availability increased even more and costs became more affordable, while maintenance and development periods shortened.

The architecture has a basic layer, a transactional core that uses DataStore to gather transaction information. Above that layer, there are several microservices created with App Engine that are application interfaces with separate functions, such as organization management and P2P transfers.

Domagoj Rozic, Managing Partner at Minaka, explains that "With Google Datastore, we've got a scalable NoSQL database platform that holds two important features for transactional systems: ACID and schemes. Google App Engine and Cloud Functions as microservice containers allow for comfortable deployment and support for the DevOps process." Minka's architecture is perfect for Google Cloud in terms of scalability: the number of transactions is sporadic and specific. In one day, transactions may vary from 100,000 to 1 million to 10 million.

Making Change

Minka currently has the ability to deploy a feature with testing and step to production in just one day, which was previously impossible using a traditional model or without the cloud. Another benefit pinpointed after using Google Cloud Platform is the possibility to offer customers access to information to find new business opportunities with an answer in real time – one of the features banks usually can't offer – even if millions of data need to be processed.

"Executing a financial service platform forces a company to abide by high security standards, provide granularity of access privileges and capacity to integrate auditing and reporting services in customers' SecDevOps processes. Using Google Cloud, we managed to meet all expectations."

—Domagoj Rozic, Managing Partner at Minka.

The transactional core of Minka's platform supports a high performance of over 10,000 tx/sec, making it the best real-time solution.

For Minka, cloud operations have become much less expensive with Google, even at its fast growing pace, as they have no staff devoted to system administration or DevOps. The company's developers have become more productive as deployment and virtual machine building don't take much time and they can focus on codes and algorithms, allowing them to deploy in 10 minutes.

Banks are beginning to understand that it is not just about G Suite but also about expanding the processes and efficiencies that banks simply didn't know before, as solutions are much faster and manageable, and because they only pay for what they use. The Google Team's support, the shared vision, ecosystem and connection of the brand have been key elements for Minka's development,"

—explains Domagoj Rozic.

About MINKA

Minka is an open banking platform built in the cloud with blockchain technology that allows fintechs and traditional financial institutions to create new financial products in days, not years. Established in 2016, its core business is carried out in Colombia and Bolivia.